King Arthur the Beloved
by LawlietLennoxLove
Summary: Charting the conquests of King Arthur, otherwise known as Great Britain, in the cringeworthy style of fairytales. With a drenching overdose of the Snow Queen thrown in. Or at least, that's what she's thought to be...though to our poor deluded Arthur she's his wife he'll chase through all four seasons and again. Oh, and he has brothers. Not children, no. Brothers.
1. Part I - British, Britain, Britannia

**A/N: I was reading 'The Snow Queen' by Hans Something Anderson a short while ago and heck it was amazing.**

…**This is not going to work, is it.**

King Arthur the Beloved

Part I

British, Britain, Britannia

Once there lived a King, where the grass was green in the hills and the silver voices of brooks and streams chimed sweeter than any church-bell, and his name was Arthur. His subjects and his people smiled when they called him King Arthur, for they were wont to remember the old tale, told by grandmothers around the fire-side, of another King Arthur. He had been wise, chivalrous, brave and just; they were glad that their King was much the same.

And so they were proud to take on another of his names, Great Britain, so that each of them, from his maids to his stable-boys, from the great sailors and explorers to the lowly shepherds, could call themselves 'British'.

They loved their King, for though he was often ruthless in fits of rages – they did not happen often, these tempests of fury when the black clouds in the darkening skies would gather, but alas, happen they did – when not even the bravest dared to approach him, he would much more frequently take his white mare to ride among his people, as though he lived in a glistening white Castle with all the gold and beautiful jewels in the world, he never forgot that some were yet poor.

This mare he called 'Unicorn', on account of the gleaming silver horn that was set in the middle of her forehead, and he was very fond of her. No matter if the road was of cobblestones or dirt or was not a road at all, but a trough of thick, slimy mud, her footsteps always sang out like the gentle lilt of harpsichords, and the people would know that the King was coming. He stopped often: to give a bundle of gold to a poor old beggar-woman by the roadside, to confer with his farmers, blacksmiths, stonemasons, for his knowledge spanned even wider than the seven seas he ruled, to console young orphans – it saddened him to know so, but there were many when the going was tough – and offer them a home in his Castle, where they could be warriors when they grew up. Truly they were blessed to have such a good King.

But most of all, they were glad that he was not like his mother, the beautiful Britannia, a swish of whose hair encompassed all the russet-brown of the earth, whose eyes held all the dark green of the forests and more. But men drew away their wives, mothers their children, and mothers and grandmothers alike frowned and kept their daughters and grand-daughters away when she passed down the street. In truth, she was sweet and kind as she was charitable, as kind as Arthur, even.

But it was rumoured that though she had no King, she would often keep the company of others, not caring if they were from rival kingdoms. And this was no decent company befitting of a young lady of such fine land and people, oh no, for though she had no King she had children aplenty – thin Caledonia, all joints and bones, rust in his hair; Hibernia, scrawny as her brother – and many had seen her entertaining Rome and Gaul, to name two of many.

And you can imagine how whispers would follow her in the place of smiles, and among her own people she carried a special curse: whenever someone opened their mouth to speak, instead of a stream of blessings a multitude of curses would tumble forth, and these would stick to her until she sickened from carrying their weight. She was very beautiful, the people would agree, but as time wore on their hisses and ill wishes grew onto her like a skin of decaying moss, and though she still could not be faulted, there was no doubt that she was horribly ugly. Her eyes were the green of the mould beneath a rock in a dank cave, and her hair, the rotting brown of diseased tree-bark.

It was sometimes whispered that when she died, many rejoiced.

**A/N: This is just me hedging. There is more to come.**

**Caledonia: old name for Scotland, and Hibernia, Ireland.**


	2. Part II - Winter

**A/N: Chapter 2? And is that a whiff of a plot? My God, I might actually finish this. Now there's a thought.**

**Many apologies, TheNinjaOfCOUGH, **_**Hans Christian Anders**_**e**_**n. DA.**_

**Enjoy.**

King Arthur The Beloved

Part II - Winter

A young maiden would draw back her curtains in her gable with a sloping roof one morning and find the first shy, delicate buds of apple-blossoms nudging up from between the tender green shoots of the slender-limbed apple-tree by her window, and Spring would greet her on gauzy wings and a soft petal-slip. She would smile when gentle breezes blew lacy willows into Summer, until Autumn swept the brown leaves into his embrace, and took them far, far away.

Many years passed, and still no-one noticed how often General Winter would visit, in an overcoat of beige and summoning icy winds that chilled the land and turned it a glittering white, like icing on a cake. Autumn flew away with his leaves, away and away, away with Summer and all the rest of the faeries, yet no-one wept for their passing, not even the gray skies, wherefrom fat, white goose-feathers swirled down and down into the laughing arms and tongues of rosy-cheeked children. The snow fell, and adults and children alike tumbled down slopes in sleds made out of orange-crates, clapping and giggling and eating hot apple-turnovers, and they forgot that it was cold.

The land glistened, as if it were covered in thousands and thousands of tiny diamonds that melted at the slightest touch of warm fingertips. But fortunately there was no more warmth, only mesmerized eyes that gazed skywards at the white, white flakes that whirled around them, and the endless gray beyond. And so the snow continued to fall, and the diamonds continued to brush across the land.

They were so enchanted by the falling drifts that they didn't miss Arthur, even when he no longer rode out on his snow-coated mare with the icicle on her forehead, even when the sugar they always kept by for her piled in neglected sugar-bowls by the window-sills, and they did not care when they were knocked over and spilt all over the floor like scattered handfuls of ice-crystals on the tiles that were no longer swept, for they were too busy watching and watching the snow.

Yet it was not the snow King Arthur watched, although he would kneel by the window of his tallest tower day and night, looking out upon his frost-bedecked lands, the specks of children skating on the frozen river, the workshops and markets that lay quiet and empty under a blanket of snow, the Maypole in the village square, its bright ribbons trailing still and silent onto the ground, all the colours of the rainbow painted over in white, while around it the children danced with the snow instead.

However, none of this was what he so yearned to see.

Only his faithful servants of the Castle were worried for him, as he ate little and laughed less, not even for his Nurse, Elizaveta, for whom he always had a special smile and a kind or playful word, and indeed now, though he possessed neither, she was the only one who could coax him away, telling him that it was too dark to see, to go to bed as if he were a little boy again, to better wait the next day for waking early, though every morning she wrung her hands and tugged at his sleeve and still he did not stop, hearing her pleas less and less until it seemed to him that she didn't speak at all.

The moonlight washes flagstones cold, as he rocks back and forth because no-one speaks to him and none of the orphans come to play with him anymore, and he is so cold, and so lonely, and he does not think that it is he who does not talk, that it is he who no longer plays with the orphans he once saved, so long ago in a Kingdom where the sun shone and the nightingales sung and the barley danced with the yellow daffodils. He does not want them, all those flowers and all that sunshine, only…

…Only the beautiful daughter of General Winter, who visits him only at night when he is asleep, and never when he stays awake waiting and waiting to catch a glimpse of anything more than the single strand of pale hair she sometimes leaves behind, and other times not even that. Now that he has seen her once, in pure white and a diadem of ice-diamonds, he cannot see anything else, not his hills or his brooks or his people that he once held so dear, only that they were cold and gray, because she isn't there.

Sometimes he creeps past the grand ball-room he never dances in, past the dining-rooms he never eats in, past the guest-room where General Winter sleeps, to kneel by the window in the tallest tower, and whisper to the cold, gray night that if only she would come, he would make her his Snow Queen.


	3. Part III - Child Of The Mirror

A/N: The plot has GONE. Waved and minced away. So it's back to hedging again.

King Arthur The Beloved

Part III – Child Of The Mirror

She sits before her mirror, which was actually a fragment of a silver star that had once, like so many before it, fallen in love with her, and had been so entranced that it had forgotten, when Night lifted his dark blanket from the heavens, to flee along with the Moon and all the other stars from Day. The star, realising that he had been left behind and that the Sun was rising, had just been about to make quick his escape lest he perish in the light, when at that moment, she just so happened to lift her head, and caught sight of the solitary star.

She smiled, and oh – how happy he was, and how he wanted her to smile again! Behind him the Sun crept a little higher, but the languishing star didn't so much as notice, sighing his love until joy! She looked up, and smiled again. And so he waited, for her to smile just once more.

But alas, the Sun had risen higher still, and blinded by his golden rays, the poor star fell from the sky, and shattered into millions of tiny pieces on the ground.

And she took one of these pieces, and had it framed in the finest gold that her father had sought out for her, and when the craftsmen had unveiled before her the finished work, she had smiled.

As the mirror was made from a star that had died loving her, it enabled her to see not only her own reflection, but those of anyone who loved her. Few had been blessed enough to behold her, but all those who had had passed fleetingly across the mirror, each and every one. Once this had been a Sea-man, the brown-eyed offspring of Germania, until one day, wielding a pitchfork, he had approached the mirror in much distress, and his image had shattered beyond repair.

Now, as she takes a comb through her hair in the dead of night, it is King Arthur she watches.

***X***

She by the window, and he by her side. In her eyes there are the images of a glazed, empty landscape, shapes of ice that skate beneath a frozen lake, like the fish that swam or the children that played there oh so long ago. She sees the Church, all veiled in a virgin's white, but no happy brides pass from under its arches. She sees the lambs who had never grown up, shivering and forgotten between the snowdrifts. She sees how the snow has jammed shut the maiden's window, how the apple tree wore a white habit, and bore no more of its red, red apples.

But Arthur, bewitched, sees only her. And she fills up his whole world, and the rest has dwindled to flakes of pale nothings.

She sighs, and the ends of her silver hair flutter.

"No crops grow of your land," she says, in the voice of a single flute. "Yet your people do not care. But beyond the hill is a blind farmer, who cannot see the world, and every day he lies by his fields, and weeps of his hunger."

Arthur, who had compassion even for a broken-winged sparrow by his window, frowned, and was troubled.

"By the brook," she says, "Is a maiden, fair and young in years. But her lips are dry and she is so thirsty, but the waters have frozen over, and she cannot drink."

Arthur shakes his head, and expels her words from his mind, for they are too ugly for so beautiful a voice.

"On the streets the children laugh and sing, but they have no homes to return to and no mothers to tuck them in at night, and they are thin, as thin as the scarecrows that stand alone without the company of the birds, who have all flown away. But the children, who have company plenty in the snow, will not live as long as the scarecrows."

She speaks, but Arthur no longer hears what she says, only her voice, and that she must continue, or he cannot survive without it.

"In my chambers, there sleeps a boy, curled up beside his cat by the fireside. But no matter how the fire burns, he cannot get warm, for every night he wakes, and cries for his papa, who he never knew."

He continues to gaze at her, and she continues to speak, sadly, even though she knows Arthur neither hears nor cares, green eyes glazed and wide.

"He is my son."


End file.
